I still really prefer GTK2 apps. The GTK3 file picker is awful, and I'm generally not a fan of apps that use the new fancy window borders like gedit.
I'm glad Mate is around to keep maintaining gtk2/gnome2.
I'm glad Mate is around to keep maintaining gtk2/gnome2.
What’s worse is that you can find many different recipes on the web on how to enlarge th scrollbars/disable auto-hide, and most of them don’t work or work only some of the time.
And the abandoning of menus, which I guess is mostly encouraged by the GNOME HIG:
Menu bars increase the vertical footprint of an application’s user interface, introduce a large number of disclosure points, and function as a fixed set of inflexible options. For these reasons, header bars and header bar menus are generally recommended over menu bars, along with other design patterns for exposing controls on demand, such as selection mode, action bars, and popovers.
So, now that we have giant 4k screens, we are going to abandon menus. And I am not even a menu user, but they are great for discovering keyboard shortcuts and the the functionality provided by applications. Instead, we have header bar and hamburger menus that can only host a small subset of the items that normal menus could host. Shortcuts become hard to find and some applications provide some shortcut overlay, while in other applications you have to figure it out yourself.
If vertical footprint is a problem, offer the user to put the menu in the system tray macOS style.
Fun fact: the Xerox Star apparently had hamburger menus, application pull-down menus, and later the global menu are an evolution of the hamburger menu. It seems that we are going backwards again, without any clear rationale. Even if hamburger menus were more ergonomic, generations have been trained with the WIMP paradigm.
[1] https://medium.com/@probonopd/make-it-simple-linux-desktop-u...
Files (Nautilus) shows some icons and 5 actual menu items. You have to guess what the icons do, only the zooming icons are somewhat clear. There are no keyboard shortcut hints.
GEdit has just a couple of items and two menus that also contain almost no items. There are also no shortcut hints.
The GNOME Web Browser has items distributed over two menus, a hamburger menu that has virtually no items and a single menu in the system tray with some more items (why are menus even in two different places?). No keyboard shortcuts in sight.
GNOME Software does not have any menus at all.
gnome-terminal is still sticks to the UI paradigm with six menus, plenty of items and shortcut indicators.
They've also eliminated the ability to incrementally scroll by clicking above or below the bar, now it jumps absolutely to the position you clicked! So when you miss the bar, and it jumps to wherever you clicked, it's unobvious how to get back to where you were before the misfire. No more arrow buttons to click on either. It's an egregious UX regression as a trackpoint-only user.
My impression is that the GNOME devs are all using touchpads and/or scroll-wheels for scrolling now and don't click on scrollbars, so they prefer to not see them and couldn't care less about how hard it is to locate and operate them via clicking.
Supposedly GNOME is the accessibility champion of FOSS desktops, but that might have more to do with the dismal state of FOSS desktops than anything else.
But I agree that it is obnoxious. I still haven't found a working GTK3 theme which is (a) dark (b) not "flat" and (c) has usable scrollbars. XFCE-Dusk is almost there, but seems to have been broken by newer GTKs, so I'm currently using Vertex-Dark.
I simply don't comprehend how one reconciles that attitude with accessibility needs, when accessibility is inherently giving a fuck about the minority.
It might be a simple matter of scarcity in developer resources. I presume most of the people bitching about GTK/GNOME in forums like these are actually capable of hacking on the project but don't, myself included. So maybe we should just be more appreciative of what we do have, there's nothing to refund after all.
Except I've had a horrible experience with scroll wheels and GTK3 - it seems to very easily get confused about widget focus.
> Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux. Wouldn't want a desktop where my only choice is Gnome's take at this.
It doesn't make any sense.
I rather prefer Qt4 apps. Some Qt4 apps look uglier after migrating to Qt5.
On ArchLinux you can run `qtconfig-qt4` to configure the look and feel of qt4 applications.
I always was a great fan of both GTK2 (for the UI) and Qt4 (for the API). GTK3 made me switch to Qt4 for development. Qt5 brings some improvement, but as a user I absolutely hate QML.
Running qtconfig-qt4 and redefining the config I wanted did fix the "ugliness" of qt4 applications after I upgraded to KDE5 (or whenever it was KDE switched qt versions)